Hi! I found your game from https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022/topic/2148162/feedback-for-everyone-windo.... I have tested and rated the game and here's my feedback about it:
- The continue button on the title screen immediately caught my attention. I did not notice at first that Start button was inactive so I was trying to be clever and press Continue instead of Start. Because of that the narrator voice complimenting me about getting to the end felt extra funny.
- The theme was interestingly incorporated in a way that I have not seen in other games in this jam. Having to play the levels backwards is a fun concepts and twists the normal assumptions of video games.
- In general I enjoyed the narrative aspect of the game. It's really cool that you actually have recorded lines for a jam game! This created really funny atmosphere to the game and improved the basic concept a lot. In general the lines worked well. Great work!
- One super specific comment about the lines: The last line of "first level" (10) and the first line of "second level" (9) both started with the same words: "It seems that you..." I didn't notice this at first time but after losing the game multiple times later and having to play the beginning sections over and over again this started to stand out. It's really small thing but if I had played few more times it might have gotten annoying. I don't know in what level of detail you have planned the lines but you could check before or after recording that lines (at least when close to each other) would have different structures to appear more varied.
- Sometimes when I die, I get the option to continue the the previous level (which I believe was the goal) but sometimes I only lose life and have to replay the same level. Rarely the level even restarts without displaying the menu. It felt unclear to me what I should be doing because the rules seemed to be inconsistent: sometimes dying was the right thing to do and sometimes it wasn't. You might think about how you could state the game rules more clearly.
- Wall jumps were super difficult to do! I'm usually comfortable doing those in other platformers but here it felt to work bit differently (maybe because the box spins?) and I never figured out how to get them to work. After a lot of trial and error I managed to have success rate of maybe around 33% for single walls jumps. Maybe once I even managed to do double wall jump. I was completely stuck at the start of level 6 because of this. I played the game to that point 3 times but did not make progress over that point and I had to give up. It's bit sad because I would have really like to see where the game was going. I'm not sure whether the main problem is the controls itself or how to teach wall jumping ability to players but as this was at least preventing progress at least for me I would encourage you to think about this subject and if there would be some way to make wall jumping more intuitive.
- Graphics of the game looked good for a jam game and the screenshots managed to spark my interest to try the game. Especially color variation in the spikes look really cool.
- One constructive criticism regarding art was that life collectable and other collectables were really similar. I could only tell them apart by size and it took a while before I understood that they had actually game mechanical difference. One thing you could consider improving would be to make the 1-ups to look more easily recognizable. You could even look into how collectables with same function are visualized in other games and think how you could make the player immediately understand what they are with the first glance. For example, one idea could be to have heart icons on the side instead of circles.
Overall: really interesting concept twisting the natural expectations for video games. Unfortunately, due too some controls being to difficult I did not see how the narrative would have continued.
Can't wait to hear you opinions on my game!